Sunday, October 4, 2015

Is work-life balance a big problem in Australia?

There was a time, not long ago, that I avoided using the
term “work-life balance” on the grounds that work is a normal part of life.
Writing about work-life balance makes about as much sense as writing about
sleep-life balance. But here I am now, writing about work-life balance! Never
mind, everyone knows that what I am actually writing about is the balance
between work and other aspects of life, including leisure, spending time with
family members, and sleeping.

According to the OECD’s Better Life index, work-life balance
in Australia is among the worst in the OECD. Australia’s ranking on this
criterion is even below that of the United States. The indicators used by the
OECD to assess work-life balance are the percentage of employees working very
long hours, and time devoted to leisure and personal care. Australia’s ranking
is 30/36 on both those indicators.

Do those indicators accurately reflect the impact of hours
of work on the well-being of individuals? In order to answer that question it
makes sense to look at the way hours of work impact on life satisfaction and
other measures of emotional health. The fact that people are working long hours
does not necessarily mean that they are irrational, or even that they are
choosing to sacrifice some life satisfaction in order to achieve other
objectives that are more important to them. They might just like working.

A few years ago, in an update of one of my more popular
posts - entitled “How much does over-work affect happiness?” - I ended up suggesting (not surprisingly) that
life satisfaction data might help to answer that question. Since then I have wondered
from time to time why I had not seen any studies using Australian survey data to
shed light on the issue. I obviously hadn’t looked!

An article by Mark Wooden, Diana Warren and Robert Drago
entitled “Working time mismatch and subjective well-being”, published in 2009,
uses HILDA panel survey data to examine the relationship between working hours
and levels of work and job satisfaction in Australia. The authors found that
neither job satisfaction nor life satisfaction varied much with number of hours
worked when the number of hours worked was consistent with the preferences of individual
workers. That suggests the OECDs work-life balance indicators are not
particularly relevant to the well-being of Australian workers.

Wooden et. al. found that the mismatch between the preferred
working hours of individuals and their actual working hours has a significant
impact on job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Both underemployment and overemployment
have similar negative impacts on job satisfaction, but overemployment has
larger negative impacts on life satisfaction than does underemployment. The
authors suggest that although the absolute impacts on subjective well-being
appear small, “the measured impact of overemployment should be viewed as
important”, relative to “quite serious events, such as the onset of severe
illness or injury”.

More recent research by Natalie Skinner and Barbara Pocock published
in the latest Australian Work and Life Index(AWALI 2014) makes use of a flourishing index (the Huppert and So index
discussed in my last post) encompassing characteristics of positive mental
health such as optimism, resilience and competence. The survey results suggest
that the rate of flourishing among Australian workers is higher than that for
European workers. The difference is particularly marked for women workers, with
41% estimated to be flourishing in Australia, compared with only 33% in EU
countries. I wonder how that can be explained.

The authors also found that rates of flourishing do not vary
with length of work hours, but do vary according to whether working hours fit
with the preferences of individual workers. The results are depicted in the
chart below.

The rates of flourishing are much lower among women
who would prefer more work than among the other categories. (The authors also
found that working unsocial hours (weekends, evenings/nights) was associated
with lower rates of flourishing for men.)

In order to show that mismatch between actual and preferred
hours of work is a big problem in Australia it would be necessary to show that
working hour mismatches tend to persist over time. In fact, research by Robert
Breunig, Xiaodong Gong and
Gordon Leslie using the HILDA data base suggests that most working hour
mismatch problems are resolved within one year. Full-time workers who prefer to
work less are the only group for which this is not true – the persistence of
mismatches is just over 50 percent for this group, but declines in a
predictable way over longer time periods. The evidence suggests that workers often resolve mismatches when they change employers.

My conclusion is that people who argue that work-life
balance is a big problem for the well-being of Australians have been talking through
their hats.

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